Trump 2020 Is No Joke

President Trump is holding the first fundraiser of his 2020 re-election campaign later this month at the Trump International Hotel near the White House.

That is now a normal sort of sentence. It may be true or it may not (in fact it is). There’s no enormity about it. Already, on the 154th day of this presidency, Americans are suffering from incredulity fatigue. Oh, we just sold $12 billion of fighter jets to Qatar a few days after Trump accused Doha of being a major funder of terrorism — that kind of thing.

So much for the theory Trump would get bored of the job (or distance himself from his business empire). He’s thinking eight years; the June 28 dinner with him is billed as a “BIG LEAGUE” event for his supporters.

What, one wonders, makes it “Big League?” Up until now, Trump has consistently fulfilled only one campaign promise: “We must as a nation be more unpredictable.” Trumpism is an exercise in arbitrariness. At its core lies distraction.

The aim is to get Americans’ heads spinning. Have them waste time dissecting statement “X” as Trump moves on to outburst “Y.” For example, “I’ll absolutely do safe zones in Syria for the people.” That was a good one.

Or, “James Comey better hope that there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations.” Six weeks later, Trump reveals that there are no tapes of the conversation. Not bad. Had a Nixonian ring to it.

Noise is the thing — and adrenaline and suspense. There is no content, meaning, history or gravity. Can the president, less than six months into his first term, really hold a 2020 fundraiser in his own Washington hotel? The Oval Office has become the Oval Adjunct. It provides, at taxpayer expense, an ancillary service to Trump properties.

Trump visits Yad Vashem, Israel’s memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, and writes in the guest book: “It is a great honor to be here with all my friends — so amazing & will never forget!”

So amazing! Almost as amazing as the White House’s International Holocaust Remembrance Day statement that did not mention the Jews. Oh, yes, them. There we have it: the unbearable lightness of being Donald Trump. His latest is a “solar wall” on the U.S.-Mexico border. Remember that one.

In “Humboldt’s Gift,” Saul Bellow wrote that the United States is “a big operation, very big.” One thing is certain: It is bigger than this little man.

Trumpism is a form of collective gaslighting at Twitter speed. It is founded on the principle that velocity trumps veracity — perfect for the president’s manic personality. It reflects the president’s intuitive sense — through his own acute experience — of limited attention spans. It seeks to achieve dominance through a whirlwind of individually meaningless but cumulatively manipulative statements.

Max Weber, the German sociologist, contrasted modern “legal rule” with “traditional rule.” In the first, “the person who commands has himself to obey the rule;” in the second, the lord’s administrative staff is made up of “personal dependents (members of the household or household officials) or from relatives or personal friends (favorites).” In this setup, “the bureaucratic idea of competence as objectively demarcated spheres of responsibility is absent.”

Trump functions, still, within our democratic institutions, but with a personal court (composed in part of family). Legal rule, as defined by Weber, is not really his thing. The vassal-like professions of fealty from his cabinet the other day — feudalism meets Pyongyang — demonstrated why he likes Saudi Arabia so much and has such evident reservations about the Republic.

There are many things that concern me about the Trump presidency — in fact, few don’t — but the frivolous blurring of truth and untruth, fact and falsehood, is the most grave. Liberty depends on facts. When the distinction between truth and lies disappears there is no basis for the rational discourse on which the organization of a free society, governed by laws, depends. Disorientation propagates itself — and disoriented people are more inclined to accept a despot as sole font of truth.

There’s no policy toward Syria. There’s no policy toward Russia. There’s contempt from the White House for important European allies. There’s shock — really — that China is not whipping North Korea into shape. There’s a grotesque attempt to deprive tens of millions of Americans of health insurance. There’s contempt from a man of 71 for the planet his grandchildren will inherit.

All of this is serious. But it’s not as serious as the seeping, constant attempt — one sacred value at a time — to disorient Americans to the point they accept the unacceptable, cede to the grotesque, acquiesce to total arbitrariness as a governing principle. On one side the Constitution; on the other the rabbit hole that leads to the Trump International Hotel.

And to Trump saying of President Andrew Jackson that “he saw what was happening with regard to the Civil War. He said, ‘There’s no reason for this.’”

In fact, Jackson had been dead for 16 years when the Civil War began. He said nothing.

There is no reason to or in Trumpism. That’s the point and the danger of it.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A18 of the New York edition with the headline: Trump 2020 Is No Joke. Nor Are the Head-Spinning Distractions.. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe